Social bookmarking for nonprofits

"Social bookmarking" refers to a growing number of web services that let people save their bookmarks of frequently visited web sites -- equivalent to Internet Explorer's "favorites". By saving your bookmarks online you can access them from any computer that's connected to the Internet. More importantly, you can share your great online finds with others. And instead of folders or categories, most social bookmarking services use tags -- subject keywords that YOU can choose and combine, so that you're always able to find the resources you've saved.

How can social bookmarking help nonprofits? Here are some of my thoughts:

Manage your knowledge. Ask staff, board and volunteers to start using a social bookmarking service instead of their browser's bookmarks folder. Life will be a little easier if you all use the same service -- e.g. del.icio.us, Blinklist or Furl. Your team will immediately discover the efficiencies of storing their favorite web resources in a form that makes it easy to share and discover new resources.

Keep learning. Once they've gotten used to storing their own bookmarks online, ask your team to start looking at the other resources available through their social bookmarking site. For example, if your fundraising team is frequently tagging items with the word "fundraising", they should start looking at the resources that people in other organizations are adding under "fundraising" -- they'll discover the best new web sites and articles on the topic. (And people who use RSS to track news can even subscribe to the RSS feed for topics that help with their work.)

Work better together. Choose an internal tag for people to use whenever they want to share a resource with other people within the organization. For example, if you worked for the Boys & Girls Club, you might choose BGCteam. (Be sure to check whether that tag or acronym is already in use before you pick one.) Ask staff to use that tag whenever they find something useful online -- in addition to any other tags that describe a given web page. And ask staff to keep an eye on the page (or RSS feed) for that tag, so that they see the resources other staff are adding.

Speak to your public. Choose an external tag for people to use whenever they want to add a resource to your organization's web page. Then create a "what we're reading" or "latest resources" section to your web site, driven by RSS feeds that use that external tag. For example, if you are using BGCpublic as the tag for web resources you want to spotlight on your site, and using del.icio.us as your preferred social bookmarking service, you would publish the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/bgcpublic on your web site.

Play nicely with others. Collaborate with other organizations by choosing a common tag. For example, DC-based organizations working on climate change might choose the tag DCCC to store and track resources that would be useful in all of their work.

I'd be delighted to hear other ideas, too!